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Further Reading

Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij (aka "Tiamo") has lost his effort to keep an original Nintendo in his cell while serving time at the Skänninge prison in Mjölby in central Sweden.

Expressen (Google Translate) quoted the Swedish Prison and Probation Service as saying in its decision:

The console is sealed in such a way that it can not be opened without the machine being destroyed. In light of this, the institution implements the necessary control of the game console and it is therefore impossible to ensure that this does not contain prohibited items.

Ars contacted the Service but did not immediately receive a reply.

UPDATE April 23 8:04am: The Service responded with the full Swedish language correspondence, which we have posted here.

The Swedish newspaper also quoted from Neij’s appeal, in which he argued that a 30-year-old gaming console poses absolutely no threat to security.

"That the institution lacks a screwdriver which costs 100 kroner [$11.50] cannot be considered reasonable," Neij wrote, according to TorrentFreak.

The French newspaper Libération (Google Translate) went to Skänninge in February 2015, describing it as one of the country’s largest penal institutions (holding just 234 prisoners) in Sweden but noted that it looks more like a dormitory with barbed wire around it than a high-security facility. Guards are unarmed, and no one has been attacked "in years."

Neij famously flaunted a Swedish arrest warrant while publicly living in Laos (although his Facebook profile states he lives in Bangkok) following his conviction for aiding copyright infringement. In 2013, he famously told a Swedish filmmaker: "I can sit here and jerk off for five years. And I will."

Neij’s arrest marks the third and final member of the remaining Swedish defendants who were originally convicted in 2009 for aiding copyright infringement. All members have lost all their appeals since. The men claim to no longer own The Pirate Bay, and it has continued to remain functional over the years.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a former Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar